B2B Digital Marketing
The 2019 complete guide to generate leads and sales promoting your website with organic and paid traffic
Introduction - The complete step-by-step B2B Digital Marketing Guide
B2B sales conversion is tough. You have to create a complete sales cycle starting at the information stage, through consideration, creating intent and then purchase. The best result would be that after purchasing, the clients will recommend your product/service and share their experience on the professional and personal social media outlets
But there is more bad news coming your way – usually buying products/software/equipment for a business needs the approval of a few decision-makers within the organization. The bigger the organization is, the rule of thumb says, more people will need to approve. A recent study shows that in a big organization, 6 professionals usually make a purchase decision. So your product, service or app will need to be scrutinized by many people and be found worth the cost.
Personal Introduction
I myself worked in government offices, corporate and small business, so I know very well the mindset behind the decision-taking process. This is the reason I decided to prepare a complete B2B online marketing digital guide, listing the most suitable digital tools to promote a business offer, create leads and B2B sales. My own professional record is in B2B travel and the hospitality industry, but this B2B online marketing guide can serve professionals in every industry as sound digital marketing logic applies to all industries.
“Push” And “Pull” Paid Traffic And Organic Traffic
I will divide my recommendations into 2 major parts:
Generating organic traffic, leads, and sales
Generating leads and sales with paid traffic.
Tables of contents
1. Introduction - The complete step-by-step B2B Digital Marketing Guide
1.1 B2B SEO
The first essential step is to optimize your website. I have seen again and again that even established websites don’t do the basic SEO work on their website. Taking into consideration that organic traffic is the traffic with the highest quality of intent, it doesn’t make any sense not to dedicate time to this mission. Here below is a step-by-step guide for you to follow on your own or hire a specialist.
Step number 1 – Keyword research
You think that you know what your customers are looking for when they search online, but you are wrong. Using simple tools, some are free (Google AdWords) you can find which exact terms users are looking for. You will be surprised, for example, that the global search volume for the keyword ‘hotel near me’ is 3.350.000 every month.
Step number 2 – Writing SEO texts
After finding out which keywords are your relevant keywords (including your brand words) write SEO optimized texts. Focus at the beginning on the long-tail keywords you want to rank on google.
Step number 3 Google titles and Google snippets
For every landing page or post, you must optimize your:
- Slug
- Google title
- Google snippet
- H1, H2, H3, and text
You need to include the word you would like to rank for in all of the above. But don’t overdo it as google also understands syntax. And keep in mind, that for every text you write you must give real value to your users.
http://www.builderallaffiliate1.com/builderall-affiliate-seo-secrets>> Step-by-step SEO guide
Step number 4 – Google analytics and Google search console
Connect your site to Google analytics and Google console to track traffic and your ranking of the different keywords on your website.
Step number 5 – Backlinks
Backlinks are the ‘juice’ of your website. This is Google’s way to see if other websites value and recommend your website. If you do the SEO work above and get high-quality backlinks from websites in your industry, Google will rank your pages in good places. Sometimes it happens organically, but if you write high-quality new posts, do share and reach out to get backlinks.
Tool Box For SEO
List of all your must-have SEO tools:
SEMrush – Intelligence tool for SEO and SEM
Google Analytics – track your website
Google Console – track your google ranking of each keyword on your website
Google AdWords – Let google show search volume and suggest you relevant keywords
Keywordtool.io – Research the search volume of the keywords you want to rank for
Similarweb.com – A must site for business intelligence
1.2 Social Media B2B Lead Generation and Networkin
1.2.1 Linkedin
The social business platform has 303 million users of whom 40% visit it daily. So your potential B2B future customers are there every day. You need to interact with them to create your professional networking and boost your online reputation.
1.2.2 Linkedin personal account
Take the time needed to create a high-quality profile. Then start finding professionals from your industry and create a professional network. Most important is to create real value for your followers. Use the option to publish articles and take part in relevant groups. This will help you to establish yourself in your industry.
1.2.3 Linkedin groups
After creating your personal account, I would recommend that the next step be to find relevant groups that are active in your industry. Start following what is happening in the groups and contribute an article as a share or better your own. It is also very important to leave long relevant comments. This is a great way to position yourself as an expert and to leave an online footprint.
1.2.4 Linkedin company account
After having a personal account, you can also create a company profile. This is a great way to establish your company’s reputation using the same methods as in your personal account. Another important reason to create a company account is, that this is the only way that Linkedin lets you own an advertising account. So if you would like to advertise on Linkedin, do create an account.
1.3 Linkedin sales navigator
Sales Navigator costs $65 per month. It is not a big expense for a business, but it will only be worthwhile and effective if you are committed to using this tool, putting in the hours in order to see results. Here below are all the features you get once you subscribe. You can do a lot with the Sales Navigator including creating an interface between your CRM. From my experience, the 2 features I used the most were sending 20 InMails a month and also getting updates on what your potential customers are doing, which post they liked, and what comment they gave. Then connecting them through InMail within the context that they are engaged in making it easier to turn cold leads to warm leads. Sales Navigator the $65 package includes:
- 20 InMail messages per month
- 1,500 saved leads
- Who’s viewed your profile
- Extended LinkedIn network access
- Advanced lead and company search
- Lead and account recommendations
- Custom Lists
- Territory preferences
- Lead and Account Alerts
- Email integrations (Gmail, Outlook Web)
- Notes and tags
1.4 Reddit groups and Facebook groups
As mentioned above in the Linkedin group section – professional groups can be a great
source for networking and positioning yourself as an expert in your field. Follow what is happening in your field then comment and publish to contribute. So, in your online research use your keywords from your professional field and track the relevant groups in Reddit and FB and become an active member.
Tool Box for Social Media B2B Lead Generation and Networking
Linkedin – Biggest professional social network
Linkedin Sales Navigator – Paid option. Advance feature to generate leads and networking
Reedit – The front page of the internet – find your relevant professional groups
2. Generating leads and sales with paid traffic
2.1 B2B Content Marketing
There are many casestudies showing that your potential B2B client will go through a few online points of contact before making a purchase decision. Positive content can be used as a crucial step, first to introduce a product/service and/or also to move the buyer one step forward to purchase-consideration. Creating content on a third party website is complicated. You can try your luck with PR, make collaborations and reachout yourself to corporations or you can pay for it. Paying for a B2B content cooperation in the fastest way and sometimes also the cheapest way. If you are looking for a B2B content marketing agency there is a low-cost B2B content marketing agency that will publish your professional content copy for free.
2.2 B2B email marketing
This is the cheapest and most overlooked way to generate B2B leads and sales. From my experience, many companies have a big email data base that is not being used properly. I would suggest that the first step is to see which data you have and start putting it to use. Take the time and consider a sequence of 3-4 emails for a product/service and start converting data to sales. You can easily achieve an opening rate of more than 20%. If you compare the cost of this sales action to any other paid channel option you will find it is the cheapest marketing/sales strategy. This can also be very well combined with content cooperation. See here prices of a content marketing agency that uses B2B email marketing.
2.3 Linkedin InMail campaign
Linkedin has a few ways to advertise (banners, videos, sponsored feed, etc.). It depends of course what your objective is, each of the channels can be effective for a specific purpose. From my experience, a very good way and still a relatively cheap option is to use Linkedin advertising platform InMail campaigns. This is a very efficient way to start a sales cycle and turn a cold lead into a warm one. You can target audiences by location, company, industry, title, skills, education, etc. An estimate of costs varies according to the target audience.
2.4 Google Ads for B2B
With 3.8 million searches per minute – it is a must place to be. Make sure you have a working B2B sales funnels before putting money into Google Ads. AdWords can bring the user to the sales funnel but this is about it. The rest is up to you. In order to make sure you are spending good money on each keyword – make sure there is 1 keyword for each ad group and many negative keywords because you need to make sure that you are locating only B2B users with a purchase intent. Spend up to $100 for each keyword for A/B testing.
2.5 Facebook Ads for B2B
Facebook is not a good advertising platform to generate B2B sales or leads. You can use it for brand awareness or creating a dialogue with your customers. From my experience, I had only limited positive conversions with lookalike based on good data and with a lead generation format.
Lookalike Facebook
FB has a great feature which is called look-a-like. You can take email lists that you own and upload it to FB. By doing so you can locate who has a FB account under this email and then connect with them. An even better feature that they have is to be able to locate within the FB platform similar users that have similar characteristics to the people on your list. This is a great way to create a broader well-segmented list of your potential customers. Then you can target this look-a-like audience using FB campaigns.
Lead Generation Ads
The big advantage of this FB campaign is that you can also use features as mentioned above and find new well-segmented targeted potential clients using look-a-like campaigns. The other advantage is that once the lead ad pops up, the email and name are automatically filled into the ad. So the client seamlessly fills in the details with no big hassle. The upside is that the campaign usually has a good conversion to leads. But from my experience, the quality of the leads is not usually very high. Nevertheless, if you would like to try this format combine it, as mentioned with your database and try to create a look-a-like audienc
Tool Box for B2B Paid Traffic
B2B Content Marketing – Low-cost B2B content marketing agency
Google Ads – Biggest online advertising platform in the world
Facebook Lead Ads – Checkout this lead generation tool
3. B2B Digital Marketing Resource Hub
When I started writing this article I made an extensive keyword research to learn how marketing professionals are searching online when they want to learn more about B2B online marketing.
Here below are the keywords with the highest search volume matched with the number 1 Google ranked position article.
B2B SEO
https://overthinkgroup.com/b2b-seo/
Social Media B2B Lead Generation and Networking
https://www.singlegrain.com/lead-generation/how-to-use-social-media-for-b2b-lead-generation/
B2B Content Marketing
https://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2016/12/01/b2b-content-marketing
Linkedin InMail campaign
https://business.linkedin.com/de-de/marketing-solutions/sponsored-inmail
Linkedin Sales Navigator
https://business.linkedin.com/sales-solutions/sales-navigator
Google AdWords for B2B
https://searchengineland.com/5-successful-b2b-adwords-best-practices-for-any-company-277308
Facebook Ads for B2B
https://klientboost.com/ppc/b2b-facebook-ads/
B2B email marketing
https://www.emailmonday.com/unlocking-the-full-potential-of-b2b-emailmarketing/
Post Author
Uri Sharon
Founder and editor of trvltrend.com. A tourism professional with many years of experience in digital and offline marketing, e-commerce, integrative media planning, and public relations. linkedin.com/in/urisharon The main focus of his writing is digital trends in travel and hospitality. Hold a Master’s degree in Tourism Development and Planning from Haifa University.